In the following essay, Richardson argues that the narrator of “The Secret Sharer” is an unreliable narrator, and that the narrative may be read as a “skeptical parody” of the Romantic literary theme of the doppelganger.

“The Secret Sharer” may well appear to be profoundly multivalent, even to the point of self-contradiction. It is at the same time both a writerly text that invites a wide variety of incompatible interpretations and, curiously, a readerly text that is quite explicitly about accuracy in interpretation as it repeatedly stages, thematizes, and evaluates interpretive acts. The critical literature, however, has generally tended to exemplify the first of these statements rather than explore implications of the latter. The paradox in this treatment of the text, I will go...